A bunch of people ran the new EC2 for Poets tutorial and got all the way to Hello World. So I'd say the new instructions work, there are still a few things to smoothe out, but we're up and running.

Now I can tell you where we're going on this little trip.

We're going to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where our forefathers, here in the USA, decided to be independent from Great Britain. We appreciated the training wheels they provided when we were a very young country, but now it's time for us to be on our own.

In other words...

I'm pretty sure we know how to create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and no central point of failure.

The goal is to create many places where blogging and journalism can occur. Where we pay for the servers ourselves, so the terms of use make sense for the high-integrity work we do. We have choice. If we don't like the service we get one place, it's easy to pick up our stuff and work somewhere else.

So we've got a start. There's a River2 aggregator running on each of the EC2-for-Poets machines. It's the same feed reading tool we had in Radio 8, a few years ago. There's a lot more stuff working in there, it's faster, and we've got a little community doing skins for it. It's a start.

And it's in a different place now. Instead of running on your desktop, it's in the cloud. Where one installation can serve many users. It's like having your own Google Reader running in the cloud. Where you can customize it to work the way you work.

Next we'll have simple blogging and synchronization tools that run in this environment.

And all of it will be built around an open format called RSS. That's how all the components talk to each other.

So if you want to use someone else's software, god bless, please do.

This is a very deliberate attempt to create a coral reef. I will put all the pieces together. I hope to make a little money from this work at some point. But I don't expect or want to make all the money. I'm more interested in creating a wonderful environment for sharing our thoughts, images, music, sounds, ideas and code. Places we can work together.

It's the same idea we started blogging with in the mid-90s, but freshened up for the way we do it in the teens.